DWT-DCT hybrid scheme for medical image compression

With the development of communication technology the applications and services of health telemetics are growing. In view of the increasingly important role played by digital medical imaging in modern health care, it is necessary for large amount of image data to be economically stored and/or transmitted. There is a need for the development of image compression systems that combine high compression ratio with preservation of critical information. During the past decade wavelets have been a significant development in the field of image compression. In this paper, a hybrid scheme using both discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT) for medical image compression is presented. DCT is applied to the DWT details, which generally have zero mean and small variance, thereby achieving better compression than obtained from either technique alone. The results of the hybrid scheme are compared with JPEG and set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) coder and it is found that the performance of the proposed scheme is better. © 2007 Informa UK Ltd.